Re: Thanks
When you do a building job by direct labour, you (not the contractor) are responsible for purchasing of materials and hiring of sub-contractors. As the job goes on, you will retain some power over what goes into the house.
There is a lot of skimping going on in the trade with materials and when we built our house, we found it is well worth our while to pay a few bob extra on various things from time to time. A builder is not going to spend his own money on those extra touches for someone else's house.
Similarly, there are a lot of poorly-skilled tradesmen working in the building industry - plumbers, carpenters, plasterers etc. When we were halfway through our project, we approached a plasterer whom we knew was working nearby. We did a bit of detective work and found out that he wasn't a plasterer at all - just a blocklayer who had 'turned his hand' to plastering because there was more money in it. If a building contractor had used that chancer while building our house under a contract, we would have had no power to stop him.
Any architect who charges 8% of contract price for house plans, "supervision" and certification is ripping their customer off. The going rate for an architect/engineer (there's really no difference form the point of view of the private customer) in the North Midlands on a private building job should be less that £1,000 for the plans & the same for "supervision" and certification. Any architect who says he will "supervise" the job usually means he will call out 5 or 6 times to the site during the period of the building project. That's fine and dandy for complying with the certification requirements of the mortgage lender but it won't do much prevent tradesmen cutting any but the most obvious of corners.
When we were getting quotes for our house, building contractors told us that we couldn't proceed without taking on our own insurance - which would cost us a few grand and indemnify us against anyone being injured or worse during construction. I think this is a red herring as when I enquired with a few insurance companies, none were willing to quote, and I was told that nobody covered that type of risk any longer, as it was a fairly limited market with high risk.
In the end, we got each tradesman to confirm in writing that they were insured to work on our house and that we were indemnified against any injury or loss to them. One or two refused to do so, bu we had no choice but to engage them anyway or wait until kingdom come for the job to be finished. Thankfully, everything passed off without any such incident arising.
p.s. I would reckon direct labour saved us at least 25% of our total project cost.